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The Sex Speech

One of the missed opportunities of the primary season was that Hillary Clinton never gave a speech about gender comparable to Barack Obama’s speech about race.

That was understandable: She didn’t want to be reduced to the “woman candidate.” But such a speech might have triggered a useful national conversation about women in leadership, and so, Mr. Obama, now it’s up to you: Why don’t you give that speech? I’m helpfully offering some talking points:

Racism is deeper, but sexism may be wider in America today. In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate, and sexist put-downs are heard more publicly than racial ones.

Presumably in part because of sexism (and also because of self-selection), women today are still hugely underrepresented in the political arena. Women constitute about 23 percent of legislators in the 50 states, a proportion that has risen only slightly in the last decade. In addition, the political commentariat is overwhelmingly male, which is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters felt unfairly battered.

We aren’t always aware of our own biases. Some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are sure that she was defeated by misogyny, while those who voted against her invariably are dismissive: The reason I didn’t vote for her isn’t that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s a dynastic opportunist who voted for the Iraq war and ...

The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of. Many studies have presented research subjects with the exact same C.V., alternately with a male name and a female name. Usually, the male is perceived as a better fit for executive posts — even among well-meaning people who are against gender discrimination, and even among women.

At the end of the day, none of this proves or disproves the thesis that gender bias played a role in the election. But if Mrs. Clinton was hurt by gender, her problem wasn’t misogynists so much as ordinary men and women who believe in equal opportunity — but also are conditioned to think that a president speaks in a gravelly voice.

A conservative may end up the first woman president. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t “very Catholic.” In the same way, the first black president probably won’t be “very black,” either in complexion or in any personal history with the civil-rights struggle. And the first female president probably won’t be “very female,” in the sense of emerging from the women’s movement.

Photo

Nicholas D. KristofCredit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, both conservatives with no association with the women’s movement, offer hints of the kind of woman who may rise to the White House. Or consider the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for president at a major political party convention. She was a Republican.

Women make a difference in politics, but not a large one. When women first received the right to vote in 1920, the assumption was that they would be a big help to Democrats, who had been more sympathetic to women’s suffrage. Instead, Republicans won the next three presidential elections. Today, the best guide to a senator’s voting behavior is his or her political party and home state, not his or her sex.

Still, it has been disproportionately women in Congress who have championed issues like family planning and abortion rights, and they also seem modestly more attentive to concerns about gender discrimination. Less perspicaciously, women were crucial players in achieving Prohibition.

Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.

In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.

Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.

What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.